u haf 2 no the rulz b4 u can brake thm! lolz

I only came close to failing one class throughout all of high school. As it turns out I actually made a D in it. Due to me having an English degree, it might surprise you to learn that this class was Honors English 3. My teacher, Mrs. Hunter, was a former Clemson professor who decided to teach high school instead, which I think is the reverse order of what people usually shoot for, but I'm not one to judge.

I remember that her class was relentlessly hard. We had to memorize dictionary definitions verbatim, read big books at a pace I was never expected to read at except when the book had pictures, memorize lots of lines from big books with even bigger words, and write horrendously long papers. I also remember her filling our heads with horror stories of how much harder college would be. For those playing at home, I'm sure you realize that that last one is a lie. I can't speak for every major, but no college English class is all that hard, and I'll tell you why: English professors are either so absent minded that you can always convince them that you've done something that you really haven't or they're softies who love for you to visit their office and will go out of their way to help you pass their class (or they're too smart for their own good and resent you for not being as smart and make it their goal to make you drop their class, but we won't talk about those teachers).

Regardless of how hard I remember that class being, I ended up gleaning gobs of wisdom from Mrs. Hunter. One in particular has shaped the way I think for a while now. "You're not allowed to break the rules until you know the rules." The beauty of the english language is that you can pretty much make it up as you go along. We're constantly creating words, changing the meaning of words that already exist and turning other words into verbs, even when it's a sin against all that is good to do so. (I'm looking at you "facebooking.") But the difference between Faulkner writing a book without punctuation to make a point about how well the human brain uses context to figure things out and the church sign down the road using "u" instead of "you" in pure ignorance is that Faulkner knows the rules. (On a side note, if you're an adult and you still text using u, r, y, or 2 instead of real words, just stop it!)

Most good artists are the ones who know the rules and break them. When someone knows the rules and they see that you've broken them, the question stops being, "Why didn't they know better?" and becomes, "They absolutely know better, so why did they do this?"

I bring this up because so many Christians today are against the "religious rules" that are all around us. But the thing is, most of us are ignorant of what the rules even are, and when we're ignorant of the rules and why they're there, we're setting ourselves up to fall into the same trap as those who came before us did. I guarantee you that no one in any church ever said, "We should wear suits and ties to church and the ladies should wear nice dresses. That'll really stick it to the sinners out there!" The religious rules that exist today, like the dress code, drinking restrictions, music styles and even what version of the Bible to read didn't start out as religious rules. They started to help bring people closer to God.

My point is this, if you try to break the rules without knowing what they are, you're setting yourself up to create a bunch of new religious rules. Rebelling for the sake of rebelling is stupid and I fear that for many Christians my age, being nonreligious is the new religion.